Death Spiral

by Leena Lehtolainen

  For the first time that whole morning Janne looked at me, his green eyes shining like a cat with a hurt paw.

  “What?”

  “‘Go ahead, quit. I give that decision about two days, max.’ And then she just took off running again. The worst thing was she was right. I don’t know how to do anything but skate, but I can’t get anywhere alone. And finding a new partner would be impossible. But now that’s all done and gone because Noora is dead!”

  The emotions that Janne had only dared express when he was skating were clear on his face again. I was sure he was going to cry, but although his face contorted, no tears came.

  Then my stupid cell phone trilled. It was Taskinen.

  “I got hold of the Nieminens, at least Kauko. Noora’s father is willing to talk to you today.”

  “What about what I asked?”

  “Kauko said they didn’t say anything but that Noora was dead, because I had asked them not to reveal any details.”

  I turned the phone off, worried that the call might have broken the delicate trust that had developed between Janne and me. He had himself under control again, and his face, which rested in his right hand, was impassive.

  “What happened then?” I asked when he didn’t continue.

  “Nothing. Or a lot, but I didn’t see Noora again. I was totally pissed. I jumped in my car and drove home and emptied the rest of a bottle of whiskey. Then I headed out to get shitfaced. Based on my debit card receipts, I had at least seven beers, but I don’t really remember. That’s why I didn’t wake up for ballet practice, and I wouldn’t have gone anyway. My phone was off until at least four. Then I went out for a drive—even though I didn’t really know whether I was in any shape for it. I wasn’t sure I should go to practice but then I decided to go anyway. That was where I heard, when I called the Nieminens, wondering why no one was at the rink.”

  Janne’s story sounded believable. On the other hand, the best lie is the one that’s almost true. Maybe Janne had just left out the part about killing Noora before going out drinking.

  “So how do you explain that your car was seen in the parking garage at the Matinkylä Shopping Center at seven forty-five?”

  “I don’t. I wasn’t there!”

  “Your car is being searched right now. We’ll need your finger-prints in order to eliminate them from any others in the car.”

  “Is it supposed to mean something if you find Noora’s fingerprints in my car? Don’t be stupid. She rode with me all the time.”

  I nodded. But we weren’t just looking for fingerprints. I asked Janne whether he had any witnesses of his movements, and he defiantly told me to ask his neighbors and the bartender at the bar he’d been drinking at.

  “Why didn’t you tell us all this yesterday?” I asked as I poured myself another cup of tea. My abdominal muscles had relaxed again, but I felt strangely lackluster.

  “So you think I spent last night making all that up?” Janne said, sneering mirthlessly. “I didn’t think you’d believe me anyway. Even though I don’t even know what I’m being accused of. How did Noora . . . how did she . . . how did she die?” Saying the last word was clearly difficult for him.

  “I can’t actually tell you.”

  “Of course not. The police don’t answer questions, they just ask them.”

  “Right. And now I’m going to have to ask you to repeat what you said about leaving the ice rink and your conversation with Noora while I have a witness here to make it all official. Then you can go.”

  “Go? Back to a cell?”

  “Home, or wherever you want, just so long as you don’t go far. May I call Officer Pihko back in now?”

  Janne was so floored that he agreed immediately. When he retold the story, his voice was tired and dull. Taking the statement only lasted a few minutes. Then I escorted him to Holding to retrieve his few belongings, his belt and keys.

  “You didn’t bring your wallet. Do you have a way to get home? I can arrange a ride with one of our officers. Unfortunately you won’t get your car back for a few days.”

  “So I’m still a suspect.” Janne’s smile was narrow and bitter. “I don’t want to go anywhere in a police car. I’d rather walk. Hopefully we don’t meet again.”

  I wasn’t thrilled to let Janne leave alone. I was sure he hadn’t told us everything. But I was secretly glad that the arrest had induced him to talk. Maybe I hadn’t screwed up as badly as Taskinen thought.

  5

  The Nieminens’ house was located on a blunt peninsula overlooking the Baltic Sea and the islands off Espoo. The rough white brick clumsily mimicked the houses of the Mediterranean coast. The landscaping had a careful elegance that was shattered by an enormous red truck with the words “FinnTransport, Inc.” stenciled on the door in gold letters. I’d read in an interview with Noora that her father owned a trucking company that had grown from a two-man operation to a medium-sized company after the opening of the border with Russia. Noora had one brother, Sami, who played ice hockey. The Nieminens hadn’t lost their only child, but the violent death of any family member was crushing. Instinctively I patted my belly, and Pihko shot me a surprised glance.

  The nameplate on the Nieminens’ door was made of handsome forged copper. The doorbell played a cheery tune. The man who answered was fat with a shiny, bald head and bushy mustache—the same man I’d seen picking up Noora after the ice show. He was on his cell phone in the middle of a heated conversation.

  “What the hell is going on at that border crossing? Of course the paperwork is right. There shouldn’t be any problem! Fucking Russians. They’re just trying to squeeze more money out of us again, but we aren’t paying. Try to handle the situation. I’m not going to be able to make it into work today either. The police just showed up.”

  Kauko Nieminen listened for a moment and then swore again and hung up.

  “I’m sorry. Work won’t leave me alone,” he said and wiped his brow with a striped handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket. He was wearing black slacks and a tight white shirt. The open top button revealed a hairy chest. It was easy to see that Noora had inherited her pursing lips and rounded face from her father, but their eyes were not the same. Kauko Nieminen’s eyes were small and light blue, while Noora’s had been round and a dark blue-gray.

  “Kauko Nieminen.” He extended his hand.

  I introduced myself and Pihko and said that we wanted to talk about Noora’s normal routes to and from the ice arena. Nieminen led us to the living room, where the decorating was far too frilly and flowery for my taste. Even the piano was white. On top of it was a smiling picture of Noora with a burning candle on either side. Her skating trophies were on display on a bookshelf at the rear of the room. Carefully placed on the shelf was also an elk rifle, which appeared to be in working order but was completely at odds with the romantic decor of the rest of the room. On the coffee table was an enormous bouquet of white and pink carnations with a black-bordered card accompanying them.

  “Please, sit. I’ll go tell my wife you’re here. Hanna is quite upset, but she promised to come speak with you.” Nieminen glanced at my belly, which protruded prominently when I sat. He seemed like he might say something, but then he went to fetch his wife.

  Hanna Nieminen was younger than I’d expected; she couldn’t have been over twenty when she had Noora. Kauko seemed about ten years older, but his weight might have been a factor. Hanna was also plump, but in a pleasant, feminine way. Noora had clearly inherited her wide hips and eyes from her mother. Hanna’s face was puffy from crying, and her faltering lipstick and blue mascara only emphasized the redness. Her black dress looked a couple of sizes too small and a few years out of style. Sherlock Maria deduced that it had probably been purchased for a previous funeral.

  “We’re extremely sorry for your daughter’s death. If you can just bear with a few questions, your help will be extremely valuable to our investigation,” I began cautiously.

  Mrs. Nieminen glanced at my belly too, where the Creatur
e had begun its midday rampage.

  “Is it your first child?” she asked. In her voice was a slight thickness. I guessed she was taking sedatives to keep herself together.

  “Yes,” I replied. Unlike Janne Kivi had asserted, police work wasn’t all about asking questions. Sometimes answering them was the key to building trust.

  “Then there’s no way you can understand how we feel! And I don’t understand why you’re here asking questions at all. It’s as clear as day who murdered Noora!”

  Mrs. Nieminen broke into sobs, and her husband patted her leg. This gesture, intended to comfort, seemed strangely like groping.

  “Of course my wife means Vesku Teräsvuori. He’s been a constant nuisance to our family for years, and now he finally carried out his threats. Has he been arrested yet?”

  “We haven’t found him, but the police are waiting at his apartment. He’ll be brought in for questioning as soon as we get him,” I said.

  “Well, good! You know the background, the threats and stalking and all that, right?” Mr. Nieminen demanded.

  “I’ve read the files, but it would help if you reviewed the main details.”

  “It was ridiculous that Teräsvuori got off with such a small fine! All the police could do was shake their heads. As if crank calls in the middle of the night and following our kids around weren’t serious enough. And now look what happened! If I could, I’d sue the whole judicial system and the Espoo Police!”

  I understood Mr. Nieminen’s anger. Stalking cases were difficult because Finnish law didn’t have any provision for restraining orders. The copies of Teräsvuori’s letters in the files seemed to me to be dangerous enough to warrant more serious action than they’d received. Teräsvuori had mostly threatened Hanna, so I wasn’t ready to arrest him for Noora’s murder without more investigation, but perhaps his intentions had changed following the publicity surrounding Noora’s performance in Edmonton. Maybe Teräsvuori had thought the best way to take revenge on Hanna was to murder her rising star of a daughter.

  “So the harassment began after Mrs. Nieminen moved back home?” My instincts told me we needed to get past Hanna Nieminen and Vesku Teräsvuori’s relationship quickly.

  “Right. Teräsvuori couldn’t accept that my wife didn’t want to have anything to do with him. At first it was just letters and flowers, calls late at night and the like. Then the letters turned threatening and the flowers turned into funeral wreaths. And he seemed to be everywhere. When we left for work, he would be standing out on the road. He would come into our office asking about transporting karaoke equipment to Russia or Germany. As if he would have needed a tractor trailer to move a pile of CDs! He was waiting at the ice rink when Hanna took Noora for practice. The fucking prick was everywhere!”

  Mr. Nieminen patted his brow and the top of his head, which was red with anger now. Hanna sat on the couch silently as a single tear rolled down her cheek, leaving a streak of blue mascara. Her hair was dyed blond, and her dark roots were showing. It was pulled back in the same kind of tight bun Ulrika Weissenberg had.

  “So Teräsvuori was in the habit of waiting for Noora at the ice rink?”

  “Now and then. A couple of weeks ago, on Mother’s Day, there was the Espoo Figure-Skating show. Noora was playing the lead role, and Teräsvuori showed up and threw flowers to her.”

  “I was there. Noora skated wonderfully,” I said, but that was exactly the wrong thing to say, because Mrs. Nieminen started weeping uncontrollably again. In an instant her cheeks had turned blue. Mr. Nieminen frantically pushed his handkerchief at her.

  “I’m sorry she’s like this,” Mr. Nieminen muttered, clearly at a loss as to how to calm his wife down.

  “There’s no need to apologize. Would it be better to let your wife rest?”

  Just then the cell phone bulging at Mr. Nieminen’s belt rang again. He was clearly glad for the interruption.

  “What the hell? That can’t be right! Wait, I need to go in the other room to talk. The police are here.”

  Nieminen covered the phone and whispered that it was an important business matter. Disappearing, he left us alone with his wife and the now-blue handkerchief.

  Once he was gone, Hanna suddenly started talking.

  “Of course Kauko blames himself for Noora’s death,” she said quickly, as if she had to say her piece before her husband returned. “It was his own fault I started seeing Vesku. I was only nineteen when we got married, and Noora came almost immediately. I didn’t get to live much. For the past few years, Kauko hasn’t had much on his mind but expanding his business.”

  “How did you meet Vesku Teräsvuori?”

  “Well, at a karaoke night, of course! I was with some girls at the Garden—I have to get out sometimes too—and after a few glasses of wine I decided to get up to sing. I did ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ and Vesku loved it. He said my voice was almost as beautiful as I was. Kauko hadn’t said anything like that to me in years,” she whispered as if afraid her husband would hear.

  The small spaces between the lines of the police report had told what happened next. First a short, intense secret relationship, and then Hanna decided to leave her family. After living together for a couple of months, she found that Vesku wasn’t the man of her dreams after all and returned to her family.

  “Of course I didn’t want to break Vesku’s heart—” She shut her mouth instantly when her husband returned.

  “Work is really piling up. Those girls don’t know how to handle anything without me! Tomorrow I’m going to have to go in. You should come too, Hanna. It’ll give you something else to think about.”

  “You both work for the family business?” I asked.

  “Yeah. It was just the two of us when we started. We had two trucks and our office was in our two-room apartment. Now we have fifty trucks and our turnover is forty million marks a year,” Kauko Nieminen said proudly. I remembered Silja Taskinen mentioning that money wasn’t an issue for Noora as a skater. The business was obviously quite profitable.

  I asked how Noora usually walked home from practice. According to Janne, the night of the murder, she went off along the walking path through the park. Her parents reported that Noora only went that way when practice was during daylight, which was rare. During the winter season, hockey dominated the skating rink, so the figure skaters either practiced at six in the morning or ten at night. Sometimes Hanna drove Noora, sometimes Janne brought her home, and sometimes Elena Grigorieva or her husband, Tomi, did.

  “So you didn’t have any arrangement to pick her up on Wednesday night? It was raining almost all day.”

  “No. It wasn’t very late and the walk isn’t far. I guess we underestimated how dangerous Teräsvuori was,” Mr. Nieminen said angrily. “I was still at work. We’ve been having issues with shipments to Russia all spring . . .”

  “Of course we should have gone to get her,” Mrs. Nieminen sniffed. “If only I had known, I—”

  “How could you have known that maniac would decide to strike that night?” Mr. Nieminen said angrily. “There’s no point what-if-ing. You should have thought before you started cheating with him in the first place!”

  Hanna Nieminen shook as if she’d been slapped and then started crying again. I was incensed at what Kauko Nieminen had just said to his wife but screamed silently to myself that it was none of my business. It was common for people to look for someone to blame in situations like these, and of course his wife’s affair had damaged Nieminen’s self-respect—but I still wanted to scream at him. Instead, I marched over to Mrs. Nieminen, dug a crumpled piece of paper towel out of my pocket, and handed it to her.

  At least Noora’s death was being mourned. The only person I’d interviewed who wasn’t insane with grief was Ulrika Weissenberg.

  After his outburst Mr. Nieminen had walked to the window to stare out into the yard as if wanting to make sure his truck was still there. I wondered how to continue. Maybe it would be best to leave. Teräsvuori would probably be ba
ck soon. Kauko Nieminen’s phone rang again.

  “Nieminen. Oh, hi, Ulrika. Thanks for the flowers.” Something Weissenberg said caused the red that had left Nieminen’s face to quickly return. For a full minute he tried to interject questions between the words flooding from the earpiece before he succeeded.

  “The officer investigating the case is sitting right here, but she hasn’t said anything about arresting Janne! What the hell is going on?” Now Nieminen was shouting at me.

  “Janne Kivi was released this morning.”

  “What? No, they haven’t arrested Teräsvuori. They probably aren’t even trying. It’s almost like they’re trying to protect him!” Nieminen yelled into the phone.

  I sighed and sat down next to Mrs. Nieminen on the couch. She had stopped crying after hearing about Janne’s arrest.

  Ignoring her husband, she asked me, “Was it Janne instead of Vesku?”

  “We don’t know yet. It wasn’t necessarily either of them. Listen, you were home when Noora left practice, right? Did anything strange happen? Did Vesku Teräsvuori contact you?”

  Hanna tried to think. Her husband had gone to the back of the room to continue his conversation, which seemed to have turned to the funeral.

  “No, Vesku didn’t call. Actually, I haven’t heard from him since the ice show. I thought he had finally decided to give up and leave us in peace.” Hanna dried her cheeks. No blue was left on her eyelashes, and her powder and foundation had collected in tiny lumps in the large pores of her skin.

  “But Ulrika called to say how furious she was with Noora. They had been fighting because Noora didn’t want to appear in the commercial Ulrika had arranged. She said she was going to come later to talk some sense into Noora, but she never showed up. And a little before seven, Tomi called. Elena Grigorieva’s husband, that is. He said he had just found Noora’s necklace at his gym. She must have dropped it a couple of days earlier.”